A blog for developers programming with Autodesk platforms, particularly AutoCAD and Forge. With a special focus on AR/VR and IoT.

298 posts categorized "Autodesk"

April 27, 2017

The AutoCAD team recently released a preview version of a new AutoCAD web viewer. Give it a try using the latest version of Chrome. What’s interesting about this is that it’s very much a taste of things to come – something I alluded to in this recent post. Here are some screenshots: The top three thumbnails link to standard models so that you can quickly take the new viewer for a spin: Here’s the “Plumbing.dwg” drawing loaded in the browser: The text on the left of this page is very interesting, particularly the piece I’ve highlighted below in bold....
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April 25, 2017

Over the coming weeks I’ll be sharing a number of guest posts by Autodesk colleagues working on a project that I think will be of interest to many of this blog’s readers. The first post is by Alec Shuldiner, who is introducing the project. At Autodesk, we have a bridge. Recently, we gave that bridge a nervous system: sensors, wires to carry the signal, a small amount of local computing power to pre-sort the data, and, far away, in a virtual head, a brain to make sense of it all. It’s a neat thing, and in a subsequent post...
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April 21, 2017

The AU2017 call for proposals is now open. The event is being held from November 14-16 in Las Vegas. Being accepted as a presenter is a great way to get exposure within the Autodesk community, as well as being a sure-fire way of attending the conference itself. Something that’s likely to be of interest to this blog’s readers: this year’s Forge DevCon is now sharing the same CFP process as AU2017 (as some of you may be aware, the DevCon has shifted from its original June date in SF to being held on the Monday before AU starts). So...
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April 19, 2017

A few weeks ago I received an invitation from an Autodesk customer – Audemars Piguet, a luxury watchmaker based here in Switzerland in the town of Le Brassus – to have a tour of their museum and production facility. So it was that yesterday I headed across to the Vallée de Joux with my friend and colleague, Francesco Tonioni, who works closely with Audemars Piguet. We were welcomed by Denys, who took care of us throughout our day there. Our tour started in the Audemars Piguet museum, where Denys educated us about the rich history of the region and...
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April 06, 2017

I had the great pleasure of attending the first half (give or take) of the recent AEC Hackathon in Munich. It was held over the first weekend of my kids’ school holidays, so I ended up having to compromise on attending the full event: I flew in on Friday afternoon – with just enough time for some VR fun at our Munich office – and flew back home on Saturday afternoon. So I didn’t get to attend the really fun piece – seeing the results of the weekend’s efforts – but I will talk in this post about what...
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April 04, 2017

On Friday I had an hour or so to swing by Autodesk’s Munich office and check out the new VR Center of Excellence. I was on my way to the AEC Hackathon at TUM – Munich’s Technical University – which was kicking off during the early evening. As I’ve found from our much more modest VR room at Autodesk Neuchatel, even simpler VR systems can take quite a bit of maintenance, and so Friday in Munich is generally reserved for the team to fix issues that have cropped up during the week. And the Munich room has way more...
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March 28, 2017

I’ve talked a little about the VR room we have at Autodesk in Neuchatel. Our colleagues in Munich have been building something similar, yet on a totally different level: they’ve just officially opened their “VR Center of Excellence”. And excellent it truly is – check out this video to see for yourself: A lot of what you might assume is post-production in the above video was actually performed in real-time. And at 4K resolution, too! Extremely impressive stuff. I really like what the Munich team has done. I’m hoping I’ll get the chance to poke my nose in on...
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March 22, 2017

While I’m not spending much time working with AutoCAD, these days, I’ve been waiting impatiently for the release of AutoCAD 2018 (codenamed “Omega”). There’s one key feature, in particular, that I’ve been waiting for – but more on that later. From a user perspective you can find information on the new release in this blog post and this preview guide. There’s also a subset covered in this intro video, if that’s your preference: Here are a few notes on the major user features. Some of these features were already part of the 2017.1 release, but many people will be...
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March 20, 2017

I’ve been interested in participating in – or at least attending – an AEC Hackathon for a couple of years now. I was first introduced to them during the VR Hackathons I attended in SF in 2014 and 2015 (Damon, Greg and Paul, who help organize the AEC Hackathons, were also organizing/involved in/attending the VR ones). There are a number of AEC Hackathons planned for Europe over the coming months, so I’m happy to say I’ll finally get my chance. I’ve been asked to present at the first – which is in Munich from March 31st – April 2nd...
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March 02, 2017

A few days ago I was reminded of a topic I’ve highlighted in a number of presentations I’ve given over the last few years, but have never actually talked about on this blog. The closest I came was probably in this post. Many people don’t realise Autodesk was an early innovator in the VR space. In the late 80s and early 90s we had a product called the Cyberspace Developer Kit – which allowed you to deliver around four frames per second of glorious, low-polygon 3D via a 386 or 486 PC – that was clearly ahead of its...
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February 28, 2017

Some of you may remember this post, which talks about the ability to export to Navisworks from Revit to bring room information into the Forge viewer. One of the side effects of using this technique is that there’s a bunch of semi-transparent room boundary geometry in the resultant model, which can make navigation a little tricky. For instance, here’s what happens when I try to select the wall at the end of a corridor (you can’t see the cursor, but you should get the idea – the invisible room geometry gets selected rather than the wall). To help improve...
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February 24, 2017

As a follow-up from Tuesday’s post, I wanted to hide the title bar of the dialog showing the legend for our surface shading feature. It turned out to be really easy: we’re deriving from DockingPanel and we simply need to override the initialize() method and choose not to create either the title bar or the close button. All we do in the method is create “move handlers” that allow the dialog to be moved by clicking and dragging anywhere on it: very important if you no longer have a title bar on your dialog. Here’s the TypeScript class I...
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February 23, 2017

Our VR room received its finishing touches yesterday, when our furniture was delivered. Even before being officially ready, the room has seen some more usage. A group of our Enterprise Support managers gave it a try recently after one of their meetings in the Neuchatel office, for instance. Tomorrow I’ll host a “drop in” morning for local Autodesk employees to come by and try it out, which should be fun. I expect it’ll be a few weeks before everyone gets to try it, given the interest people have already expressed in what VR can offer Autodesk customers.Before that, though,...
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February 17, 2017

Today I was asked to add the ability to place a custom logo onto an instance of the Forge viewer (in my case for Dasher 360, of course). It seemed like an interesting one to share, as I’m sure others have the same requirement. There are probably lots of ways to solve this – for instance by adding the image with its own camera as an overlay inside the Forge viewer’s 3D scene – but I decided to stick to something simple and have the browser overlay the image. There are a few changes needed for this to work....
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February 14, 2017

The Forge team (many of whom I worked with back when I was part of the Autodesk Developer Network organisation) have created a new developer blog focused on all things Forge. You’ll find a lot of the usual suspects who contributed to the Cloud & Mobile DevBlog (in fact that particular blog’s content has already been migrated across to the new site with the Forge branding). I expect lots of helpful information will be posted during the coming weeks/months/years. Be sure to bookmark it and check back regularly. Now if only I could find out how to search the...
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February 10, 2017

There’s a lot happening in the world of WebVR at the moment. Today’s big news is that Chrome 56 has now been released for Android, bringing WebVR support to Daydream phones (other devices to follow). This is an important landmark on the journey towards ubiquitous WebVR-capable devices. At some point we’ll be getting a desktop version of Chrome that has WebVR, too: for now I’m still testing with Chromium, as suggested by the WebVR download instructions. The other noteworthy event – at least from Autodesk’s perspective – is the release of v2.13 of the Forge viewer. This brings some...
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February 08, 2017

Yesterday Carl Bass announced he would be stepping down as CEO of Autodesk. The news came with the 9am Pacific press release, followed quickly by Carl’s email to employees (reproduced here). I’m pretty sure that only a handful of people knew about this in advance: the rest of us were completely stunned. Autodesk has had “participation” from activist investors over the last year and a half or so – they were even mentioned in the press release talking about Carl’s departure – so clearly the concern was that Carl was in some way pressured into leaving. At least that...
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February 07, 2017

On Friday we had our first external visitors to the VR room at Autodesk Neuchatel. Jose and Erich came across from Amstein + Walthert, an engineering firm headquartered in Zurich. Jose had reached out to me – we’ve been in contact a few times, over the years – as he’d read about the VR room on this blog and was curious to try it out. The room still isn’t 100% ready – we’re waiting for some furniture to show up – but it seemed a good opportunity to try out some of our VR demos on live volunteers. Here’s...
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February 03, 2017

I have some big news. My wife and I have decided to take our three children out of school for a semester and travel around the world for six months. We’ll be leaving at the beginning of July and spending a month in each of North America, South America, the South Pacific, ANZ, South Asia and South Africa, returning at the beginning of 2018. This is the reason I’m likely to be skipping AU 2017 and this year’s Forge DevCon, by the way. So it goes. During the trip my wife will be “road schooling” the kids for a...
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February 01, 2017

Yesterday I finally took the time to work on one of those tasks that had previously never quite bubbled up to the top of my priority list. Since I’ve been working on Dasher 360 I’ve put up with using the developer tools built into Chrome for debugging. While these are pretty good – especially with source-map support, allowing us to debug the source TypeScript code – which is the main reason I haven’t taken the time to do otherwise, they do have their limitations: just for instance, you very often start to edit code in the debugger before realising...
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